Origin

History goes back to a very ancient root that is also the source of Latin videre ‘to see’ ( see view) and of the Old English word wit ‘to have knowledge’. More immediately it came from Greek historia ‘finding out, narrative, history’. In its earliest use in English a history was not necessarily assumed to be true: it could be any narrative or story, an idea echoed by the American motor manufacturer Henry Ford ( 1863–1947) when he said ‘History is more or less bunk.’ To make history, ‘to do something that influences the course of history’, dates from the mid 19th century. A less positive view of history appears in the phrase to be history, ‘to be dead or no longer relevant to the present’, which is recorded from the 1930s.